Focus on football, not flu at St. Charles East Saturday

No hand sanitizer, no masks. Just scarves, mittens, and a lot of hot cocoa.

St. Charles East High School football fans were focused on protecting themselves from the cold Saturday afternoon, not the flu.

Friday's scheduled football game against St. Charles North was instead held Saturday afternoon, following a H1N1 scare at East's campus Tuesday.

More than 900 students - roughly 45 percent of the student body - called in sick with flu-like symptoms, prompting officials to cancel classes for the rest of the week.

By Saturday, symptoms as well as worries seemed to have subsided.

"We're out in the open, we'll be fine," parent Sharlene Thomas said.

Thomas' younger daughter, Vicki, a freshman, spent much of the week recuperating from the flu.

She said she had no hesitations about sending Vicki back to school Monday.

"It's nice they took precautions, let the antibiotics work their way through kids' systems before opening again," she said.

Students at the game said they didn't believe it was an exaggeration that nearly 1,000 kids were actually sick.

"I believe it," senior Caroline Niski said. Coming off homecoming week, which culminated with an Oct. 17 dance, students were run down, and in close contact, she said. "You can definitely see why it spread so fast."

Phone calls made by high school teachers to sick students and their parents on Thursday showed only about 26 percent (about 569 students) of students at the school still felt too ill to come to school. That's an improvement over Wednesday when 34 percent of the student body said they were still sick.

Athletic practice at the school resumed Friday, and games and meets Saturday. Classes will be held again on Monday.

The 2 p.m. football game saw hundreds of students streaming into Norris Stadium, laughing and texting as they waited in line for tickets.

Unlike St. Charles East, other surrounding schools' haven't seen similar spikes in number of sick students.

St. Charles North didn't elicit any fears about the flu traveling across town - or across the line of scrimmage.

"We haven't even talked about it," St. Charles North head coach Mark Gould said. Only one of his players was out sick Saturday.

"If the kids are nervous, it's about playing their rivals," he said.